Point-Counterpoint: The wage gap is unavoidable, not unfair

Editor’s note: This column is part of a point-counterpoint set of columns on the wage gap. For the corresponding column, see “Point-Counterpoint: Discrimination causes the wage gap, nothing else.”

A common talking-point in identity politics is the difference in earnings between men and women.

The so-called “wage gap” seeks to describe the idea that men enter the workforce with a built-in advantage, receiving an automatically higher pay for the same work, hours and qualifications, simply because society values men more.

The most commonly quoted statistic backing this is from Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which states “female full-time workers make only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men, [with] a gender wage gap of 21 percent.” This statistic, however, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The Washington Examiner reports, “The wage gap actually comes from the different career choices men and women make on aggregate — whether it be the hours they work or the occupation they choose.”

The “pay gap,” in its current terminology, is not a difference in wages, but rather a difference in earnings. The pay gap only compares gross income of all working men in the United States compared to the gross income of all working women — which is just too general. The actual difference in earnings stems from lifestyle and career differences between men and women.

As the Washington Post puts it, the incredibly simple equation used to illustrate this lack of income equality is “a ratio of the difference between women’s median earnings and men’s median earnings.”

This is a bare bones piece of simple math that informs readers in absolutely nothing of substance. The equation does not account for essential confounding variables, such as differences in career paths.

Things are relatively equal between the genders at the beginning of careers. In many urban areas the pay gap is actually reversed, with young women in major urban areas out earning their male peers, according to The Guardian. It’s as time goes on that choices and life events begin create a disparity in earnings.

While women are more likely to go to college, they are far more likely to pursue their passions, as opposed to men who are more likely to pursue degrees for the sake of monetary gain, according to a 2015 report from the Census Bureau. The Wall Street Journal points out, “Even within groups with the same educational attainment, women often choose fields of study, such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market. Men are more likely to major in finance, accounting or engineering.”

The Wall Street Journal goes on to discuss how that emphasis on money affects men and women in the workplace. Men are more likely to negotiate for higher pay at an interview, leading to higher wages and bigger raises.

In a similar vein, men are more likely to take dangerous and hazardous jobs, which offer high wages to encourage employment. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 92 percent of on-the-job fatalities are men. Men are placing enough of an emphasis on earning high wages that they’re literally dying for it.

Finally, children and maternity can take a toll on a woman’s professional life. If women have children and recieve maternity leave, they will have to miss out on an average of twelve weeks of continuous work. This is less time to prove themselves, network and generally aggregate professional resources. No matter how long we make maternity leave, nor how much money we compensate women during it, there is no way for them to make up the time lost from the hours they miss. Women, on average, have their first child at the age of 26, which is during their peak earning and corporate-climbing years as professionals.

These differences paint a clear picture of why women earn, on average, less than men. Women pursue more balanced, non-financial focused lives. They tend to major more in humanities in college and focus on family later.

Many try and chalk this up to some form of gender discrimination, saying that women are discouraged from entering STEM fields.

According to the Association for Psychological Science, a study conducted at our very own University of Pittsburgh found that women who scored well on both math and science tended to still avoid STEM. “Students who also had high verbal abilities — a group that contained more women than men — were less likely to have chosen a STEM occupation than those who had moderate verbal abilities.”

Additionally, the research stated, “Our study shows that it’s not lack of ability or differences in ability that orients females to pursue non-STEM careers, it’s the greater likelihood that females with high math ability also have high verbal ability,” and ultimately choose to pursue that skill instead.

In this way, maybe the women that are creating this “pay gap,” as activists like to call it, are not the disenfranchised, exploited victims as liberals paint them to be.

We need to take a step back and stop treating young girls as pawns for policy makers to move into the correct category of education. Instead, we need to offer them a wide variety of outlets through which they can explore what interests them, a goal that the Girl Scouts pursues by offering job shadowing and informational opportunities, such as the Imagine STEM program. It’s organic, and lets girls decide what career they want to pursue for themselves, whether that’s STEM or the fine arts.

We can campaign all day long to try and make women chase money as much as men, but at the end of the day, everyone should have the right to be or do what they want. As a professional communications major, I’m probably going to be doing my part to level out the wage gap myself.

Timothy primarily writes on free speech and media culture for The Pitt News.

Write to him at thn17@pitt.edu